A Russian Mil-blogger Confronts his Stuation

Russian Z-Blogger Maxim Kalashnikov contemplates the recent anniversary. Via Illia Ponomarenko:

“WE CAN DO IT AGAIN” HAS FAILED

So, the Ukrainian war has now lasted longer than the Great Patriotic War. One can say with confidence: the long-standing propaganda slogan “We can do it again!” has confidently failed. We can’t. In the fifth year of positional slaughter in Ukraine, both the leadership and the top-level command nodes (civilian and military) remain intact. The bridges across the Dnipro and major railway hubs are intact. And our infantry is forced to pay with bodies (people versus drones) for turtle-paced advances. All of this is already leading to irreversible perturbations inside the Russian Federation after the war. My soul feels extremely heavy. I am restraining my emotions as much as possible.

It is already clear that all the benefits of this war will be reaped by the USA and the PRC, while Russians are left with blood, ruins, and losses. This is, without a doubt, a case of “we have outsmarted everyone” and a triumph of foreign policy.

After 1,418 days of war, our military reputation has been severely undermined. The United States is openly mocking us. And it’s not just about what happened in Venezuela. The point is that American military analysts say: the Russian Federation failed to achieve full air supremacy, as a developed country is supposed to do, and therefore slid into a losing war of attrition.

…It is obvious that the Russian Federation is being steered toward a forced end to the war and toward further stagnation in the role of a poor and weak “junior partner” of Washington in the confrontation with the PRC.

At the same time, Kyiv receives security guarantees from Washington, NATO troops on its territory, and investments of 800 billion dollars in the reconstruction of Ukraine.

An entire era is coming to an end: when the authorities of the Russian Federation were engaged exclusively in imitating great-power status rather than creating it in reality. When PR and propaganda triumphed over real life…

In 2026, this war will be forcibly brought to an end.

After it, the Russian Federation will face the harshest hangover and “withdrawal.” A Transition is inevitable, along with shifting responsibility for what happened onto a specific individual and an analogue of the “debunking of the cult of personality at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.” [When Kruschev denounced Stalin.]

This will be followed by painful attempts to reform the failed political and economic models. A new attempt at perestroika awaits us.

I reject the version according to which, after the "special military operation," an extremely harsh regime with an “electronic concentration camp” and ruthless repression will be established in the Russian Federation.

Because our “elite” is mortally afraid of such a scenario. Because it understands that repression would begin grinding it up first, launching a bloody redistribution of property and control over financial flows. Any attempt to “tighten the screws to the limit” would be extremely short-lived. The scenario of “withdrawal due to fatigue” is far more realistic.

I call on all true Russian patriots (let the pro-Western traitors go to hell) to think about how to live on. How to act in the most difficult and dangerous post-war period. 

This war has been one of the saddest events of my lifetime. It has inflicted losses on the whole world and helped nobody but arms manufacturers.

The Ukraine War in Context

As of today, the Russian attack on Ukraine has lasted as long as the German attack on the Soviet Union in WW II, from 22 June 1941 to the fall of Berlin.

Is Ground News a CIA Operation?

Ground News is a news aggregator that sponsors several of the YouTubers I follow: Perun, William Spaniel, Kraut, and others. All of these are moderate, rational, pro-western, anti-Russia voices.

The folks at Ground News tout themselves as helping you avoid media bias by providing information on who owns each news source, a rating for the site's reliability, and an estimate of the site's ideological bias. (They give savagely low reliability ratings to Russian government sources.) You can also get a "blindspot feed" that will show you stuff that your usual news diet misses.

One day while listening to a YouTuber tout Ground News for the hundredth time I suddenly wondered: who is paying for all of this? How can these people possibly be making enough money for all these sponsorships?

So I looked it up and found this:

Ground News is a Canadian news comparison platform that aims to reduce media bias by showing readers multiple perspectives on current events. Founded in 2018 by Harleen Kaur and Sukh Singh, the company is based in Kitchener, Canada. . . . Ground News is independently funded through subscriptions and a small group of investors, avoiding backing from major media, tech firms, or governments.

Google's AI adds that Ground News has never been profitable.

So I am thinking, is this "small group of investors" really a front for the CIA? During the Cold War the CIA did this all the time, often secretly; I remember reading about several anti-Soviet groups or publications who were rather startled to discover that the funding they thought came from NGOs or obscure arms of the French or German governments really came from the CIA. Some of them were not particularly pro-American, seeking some sort of middle political ground, but the CIA didn't care as long as they opposed the Soviets and called out communist crimes.

And note that while much of the Trump administration has gone waffly on Russia, the CIA is still doing all they can to combat them, most recently providing Ukraine with information on the exact locations of Russian air defenses so they can route their missiles and drones safely to targets deep in Russia.

And, hey, if the CIA is not involved, maybe they should be; my view is that Russian policy is so wicked, and so unjustifible, that any attempt to present a truthful point of view is bad for them.

Iran

One hestiates to hope, but Iranian protesters have taken control of several cities and burned numerous police stations and other government buildings. In some cities, the police have joined them. Could it be?

The Ongoing Saga of Teaching Plato at Texas A&M

A&M philosophy Professor Martin Petersen submitted his syllabus for a freshman seminar on ethics, only to be toward that his readings from Plato's Symposium violated new university policy that forbids the teaching of "gender ideology." He was ordered to make immediate changes to his syllabus:

His response:

The "I Would be a Lousy Spouse" Problem

This is from Leah Libresco Sargeant in the Wall Street Journal, but I have seen similar statements from people who work directly with adolescents:

In 10 years of surveying high-school seniors, the Monitoring the Future project has found that fewer and fewer young men and women expect they will be “very good” as a spouse. It’s little wonder the share who expect to get married has plummeted in parallel.

Holding a stable job and being able to provide for one’s family is part of what it means to be a good spouse, but it flows out of bigger questions of character and how one handles responsibility. If we want to see marriages rebound, it isn’t enough to focus on expanding blue-collar work. High-school seniors need to have more faith they can handle the duties of marriage and child-rearing. Giving them more lectures on how important marriage is won’t do it—they think so highly of the institution that they judge themselves incapable of living up to it. Kids need more time away from adult supervision, pursuing projects of their own design, with the freedom to fail and to learn.

I have been wondering about this for decades. In the 1960s and 1970s we had a surge in divorce, which has since tapered off. But this seems to have left many Americans with a sense that marriage is difficult, that it is something you have to work very hard at if you want to succeed. You may have seen the sort of propaganda directed at girls and young women by Evangelical and Mormon churches, which says that you don't necesssarily need to find the right person, but you do have to be the right person.

Once upon a time marriage was just what most people did and nobody thought it required being a special sort of person. Now the message often is that marriage will require your supreme effort.

Are you the right person? Are you ready to make that supreme effort?

I have also wondered about Libresco's other argument, that young people shy away from marriage because they don't feel ready for any sort of adult responsibility. It does seem to me that adolescence keeps extending out farther and farther, and now many people seem to think that 30 is the minimum age to be a real adult.

I don't have anything profound to say about this, it just strikes me that the declining marriage rate for Americans in their 20s is related to changes in how we think about both marriage and life in your 20s.

Addendum:

The Heritage Foundations suggests "boot camps" for unmarried couples to teach them how to be married. I'm not picking on them; this is just another indication of how our whole society feels about marriage.

Links 9 January 2026

Roman Medusa intaglio found in Austria

Hans Rosling at TED, an ode to economic growth via the magic washing machine, extraordinary 9-minute video.

The super complainers.

Still uploading chapters of The Voice from the Darkness at Royal Road.

Carnyx (Celtic battle horn) and boar's head standard found in England, c. 50 BC to 50 AD.

Austin Peay State University in Tennessee has to reinstate a professor they fired over a social media post about Charlie Kirk, and pay him $500,000. I think we sue each other way too much but the system sometimes allows people to fight injustice.

Richard Feynman, "What is Time?", 23-minute video. Takes the view that the arrow of time derives from entropy.

Humanists against new technology.

Magnus Carlson on winning his sixth World Blitz Chess Championship: while other players may be there to do the best they can, or to earn money, "a serious advantage I have is that I am playing for first place."

Sabine Hossenfelder, "The End of an Era in Physics," 7-minute video. With string theory, supersymmetry, and other recently hot ideas played out, what comes next? And Hossenfelder on wave energy, which has huge potential.

Richard Hanania, How I Outgrew Nietzsche. Personally I outgrew Thus Spake Zarathustra but am still a big fan of Beyond Good and Evil. All the superman prophecy stuff wears thin, but Nietzsche was right that most philosophy was (and is) assumptions all the way down.

Archaeologists working at the Maya site of Ucanal find evidence of an important political event: the founder of a new dynasty seems to have dug up the graves of his predecessors and burned their remains. (news story, academic article) It's hard to document events archaeologically and cool when we can.

Medieval seal that incorporates a Roman carved gem found in England. I love this because I often wonder about the attitude of medieval people toward the Roman past. I had the more educated characters in The Raven and the Crown think regularly about the Romans, for example when crossing Hadrian's Wall, but I was just making that up because I have no idea what knights, ladies or priests knew or thought about Rome in the early 1300s.

China seems to have abandoned its plan for a super particle accelerator. Presumably this is at least in part because few physicists think there are any new particles to be discovered at the energies it could reach.

Perun, strategic winners and losers in 2025, one-hour video. He gives the top prize to the new regime in Syria and annoints Iran as the biggest loser (because of the multiplying military, political, economic, and ecological crises).

I personally recommend against learning about the beliefs of authors you love, but if you want an introduction to W.B. Yeats and the occult, here is a serviceable one. I think Auden said it best, writing of Yates and his magical experiments "your gift survived it all."

It is now possible to do some paleogenomics work in the field, without moving the bones being studied. The hope is that this will persuade some guardians of ancient burial grounds to allow DNA studies.

The Nike track suit Maduro wore after his arrest became an overnight best-seller.

Did Biden's policies cause a surge in immigration? This piece says no.

Economists argue that if you take account of Social Security – a kind of wealth Americans accrue while working – then wealth inequality has gone up a lot less than usually projected: "Its importance has grown dramatically over the past three decades. In 1989, Social Security represented only 26.0% of the wealth of the bottom 90%. In 2019, this percentage rose to 49.8%. We cannot understand household balance sheets without paying attention to Social Security." (Twitter/X)

In the US, married people are healthier then single people of the same age, possibly because spouses nag each other to do healthy things. (Twitter/X)

The National Portrait Gallery in London acquires the only two known photographs of mathematician Ada Lovelace.

Kraut on how Italian fascists desensitized the nation to brutality, and how sinister actors in the world are still trying to do this to us, powerful 12-minute video.

The remarkable case of a Texas A&M professor who was banned from teaching Plato's Symposium, "particularly passages on Aristophanes’ myth of split humans and Diotima’s ladder of love," because of new rules that ban teaching "gender ideology." The new conservatives are trying to give the old leftists a run for their money in ideologuing the university.

An excellent reading of "The Door in the Wall" by H.G. Wells, a short story about the tragedy of finding a door to better worlds, 42-minute video. Text here. Much like the others on which I based my own version, Dreamland. Until I read E.T.A. Hoffman last year I did not know this was a common literary form.

The Kafka industry.

Something I did not know: until the 1965 Immigration Act, the US had no limits at all on immigration from Latin America. (Twitter/X; interesting history of US immigration policy)

Serious look at the relationship between Bukele and El Salvador's gangs.

Russia has dispersed its front-line troops so thin that Ukraine is using expensive HIMARS rockets to strike groups of a dozen men. This strike led to ten deaths.

Andrew Perpetua's team counted 48,869 Russians killed in the Ukraine war this year, using video evidence; December was the bloodiest month, with 5724. All for nothing.

Old meets new: Russian cavalrymen with horse-mounted Starlink terminals.

Why Aren't Professors Braver?

In the Chronicle of Higher Education, Paul Bloom asks the question. He offers a couple of explanations, starting with a fanous old one from Noam Chomsky:

The whole educational and professional training system is a very elaborate filter, which just weeds out people who are too independent and who don’t know how to be submissive. … [The schools] reward discipline and obedience, and they punish independence of mind. … Most of the people who make it through the education system and get into the elite universities are able to do it because they’ve been willing to obey a lot of stupid orders for years and years.

But Bloom favors a different explanation, that professors are afraid to offend because their lives depend on getting along with their colleagues. Starting with getting hired:

Let me tell you about a search committee I was once on. We were looking at senior candidates, and someone’s name came up — a person of considerable accomplishment. And then a member of the committee said something like, “I hear she’s difficult. Not really a good colleague.” And we all moved to the next person. . . .

The point here is not just that it’s good to be liked. I’m sure that helps, but I’ve seen people secure great jobs due to their accomplishments as scholars and scientists, even if they weren’t especially popular. Instead, the point is that it’s bad to be disliked — even by a small proportion of people. If 90 percent of the field adores you and 10 percent will describe you as “difficult,” you’re likely screwed, career-wise.

Bloom goes on to discuss a study I referenced here before:

The negative effects of having unconventional views aren’t limited to search committees. A 2012 study of about 800 social psychologists found that conservatives (about 6 percent of the sample) fear the negative consequences of revealing their political beliefs to their colleagues, and so they shut up about them. They are right to do so. The same study finds that many of these nonconservative colleagues, particularly the more liberal ones, tended to agree that if they encountered a grant or paper with “a politically conservative perspective,” it would negatively influence their decision to award the grant or accept the paper for publication. They also tended to agree that if they had to choose between a conservative candidate and a liberal candidate, they would select the liberal one. 

But the real issue is with a minority of more extreme professors who exercise a sort of hecklers' veto:

while most professors are upset at the censorious nature of their colleagues, a minority believe that a proper response to someone who expresses a taboo view is “ostracism, public labeling with pejorative terms, talk disinvitations, refusing to publish work regardless of its merits, not hiring or promoting even if typical standards are met, terminations, social-media shaming, and removal from leadership positions.”

Given this censorious minority, the reasonable response is risk aversion. Don’t say anything that will piss off these colleagues — and that includes not making statements that they find politically or morally unacceptable. If you’re not careful in this way, you run the risk of not being hired, not getting tenure, and having your career damaged in all sorts of other ways.

I would add a third factor here. Some professors mainly want to be left alone, but the more ambitious want to be part of a group of cool people doing cutting edge things. Scholarship in this sense is a conversation, so what many academics want is to be part of such a conversation, with people who take what they say seriously. Getting cancelled for conservative views would keep you out of many such conversations.

Academia is a social enterprise, and as such prone to all the troubles that can afflict any community. Over the past 20 years deference to angry leftists has been a serious one. These days MAGA folks are doing their best to shift the bias in the other direction. I doubt they will have much success, but maybe it will embolden those who have had enough. For example we have seen a bunch of schools drop the "diversity teaching statement" nonsense.

The social nature of academia will always make these issues difficult, but we can do a lot better.

Americans Unite Against Making the Country Better

In the 1990s and 2000s we had a bunch of Federal reforms aimed at making public schools better, most notably "No Child Left Behind." As measured by test scores, students started getting better.

But much of America hated it, including leftists who hate standardized tests and conservatives who hate Federal interference in public education. So in 2015 we got the Every Student Succeeds Act, which dropped all the requirements for recipients of Federal funding that were driving the pressure.

It was a paradigmatic case of how, in America, political agendas can wreck any program, not matter how beneficial.

Test scores started to fall, and then in the pandemic they plunged.

When they came back only modestly after the pandemic, people began shouting about this, and now we once again have a lot of discourse around student test scores. But the Feds won't be stepping in, and it is up to the states to enact programs like the one in Mississippi to get test scores back up.

With the huge headwind created by the vast spread of short-form video and other smartphone distractions, it is going to be very hard to get students reading again. But, hey, we have AI for that, right?

Ancient Near Eastern Art from the Cleveland Museum

The "Stargazer," limestone statue from western Anatolia, c. 3000 BC, 17 cm (7 inches) tall

Sumerian seal in the form of a limestone bull, c. 3250 BC, less than 5 cm (2 inches) long.

This is identified as a "Decorative Cylinder," so I guess nobody knows. From Ziwiye in Iran, c. 1000 BC, 7cm (3 inches) tall

Hittite deity or priest, c. 1600 BC, 88 cm (34 inches) tall

Lion/Bull, Iran, 1500-1000 BC

Bronze Crescent Ax Head, Amlash, Iran, c. 1000 BC, 33.5 cm (13 inches) long

Stone Libation Dish, likely Syria, 1600-700 BC

Bronze Belt with running animals, possibly Scythian, c. 1000 BC

Wealth and the Generations

There is a lot of froth in America right now about how tough the young have it: crushed by student loans, unable to buy houses, trapped in low-end jobs, etc. The counter-argument from economists is that, actually, the current generation of young people is accummulating wealth just as fast if not faster than the Baby Boomers did, and if they are buying fewer houses that is mainly because they are not getting married. (See the chart above.)

A commenter on Scot Siskind's substack wrote this:

Looking at some ‘wealth by generation over time’ graphs, I have an intuition that there’s a stable and repeating pattern in the US of the elderly accumulating all the wealth and power while the young are struggling and disenfranchised. And that this creates a legitimate and perpetual intergenerational conflict where the old people really are hurting the young by keeping wealth away from them and passing policies that benefit themselves and their preferences.

I think there is much wisdom here. I remember, back when I was young and struggling, reading something like, "of course the young feel deprived, they suffered a major fall in their standard of living when they moved out of their parents' houses." At the time this puzzled me, because I had never thought of things in quite that way. I saw living in crappy little apartments as part of being young and never considered it to be deprivation. But if what many people in their 20s want is what they had at 17, and that was their own room in a nice house in nice neighborhood with no worries about food or utility bills, then they probably do feel deprived. I am much better off, materially, than I was at 25 or 30 or 35.

I suspect the curves in that graph at the top were different in the pre-WW II era. If what mattered most was how hard you could work, your wealth peaked when you could work hardest, not as your body started its grim decline. But people still went through a cycle of struggle, comparative wealth, and then decline.

One of my favorite historical books is A Midwife's Tale by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich. This chronicle of a Maine woman in the late 1700s traces out the arc of her economic life, which peaked when she had teenage daughters in the house. She was then the mistress of an impressive economic machine, with willing hands to weave, spin, and do other economically productive tasks. She saved money and bought land. Once her daughters married, and her own health declined, this all dropped away one bit at a time until she sold her loom and slid into unproductive and impoverished old age.

We have a different arc, but it is just as powerful. For someone like me, my salary will probably (God willing) peak right before I retire at about 67. If all goes according to plan, my mortgage will be paid off and I will be able to live comfortably on Social Security and my substantial IRA. My wealth will then gradually decline, but if I am lucky it will be enough to keep me fed and warm until I die. The enormous increase in the value of my house will provide a cushion should I need to move into a retirement home. Unless the US economy suffers a major crash, I would probably have to live well into my 90s to be as poor as I was at 25. So far as I can tell, that is a common arc for college-educated people of my generation, and the data seems to show that younger generations are tracking pretty much the same. That is our pattern.

One of the problems with our economic trajectories as currently constructed is that under this system we are poor during our prime child-bearing years. People like me bite the bullet, have kids and struggle, hoping to come out the other end ok. But if you already feel economically stressed and don't have nearly the material circumstances you want, I suppose that having children seems like a huge burden. My wife and I wanted children so much that none of that mattered, but I do see the problem.

But this is all about expectations. At 25 I lived in crappy apartments and ate lots of macaroni and cheese, but I never went hungry or shoeless. By global standards I was never poor. When my wife and I had three small children our lives were frantic – for a while we worked opposite shifts and one some days only saw each other on the way in and out the door – but it was the life I chose, so I never complained, and I now think it was very much worth it.

I am sure that our sytem could be better constructed and more fair. But if the complaint of young Americans now is that they are oppressed and deprived in a way their parents were not, they are wrong. They are just living through a different part of their lives.

Christie's American Art Auction

Frederick Remington, Coming to the Call, 1904

Charles Marion Russell, The Whoop-Up Trail, 1899 (The Whoop-Up Trail was a trail like the Chisolm Trail, not something you did for fun)

Albert Bierstadt, On the Wisconsin River near Milwaukee, 1866

Mary Blood Mellen, Taking in Sails at Sunset, c. 1855

Childe Hassam, Gloucester, 1895

Evertt Shinn, Lunch Wagon, Madison Square, 1904

John Frederick Peto, Still Life with Carpet Bag and Umbrella, c. 1900

Jerzy Giedroyć and the Rebirth of Poland

Giedroyć in 1987

Jerzy Giedroyć (1906-2000) was a Polish intellectual. In the 1930s he devoted much energy to promoting peace among the Poles, Ukrainians, and Lithuanians who found themselves within the post-Versailles borders of Poland. He avoided the Polish catastrophe of 1939 because he was serving in the Polish embassy to Romania. From there he eventually made his way to British Palestine, where he joined the Carpathian Rifles and fought with the British at Tobruk. After that he worked as a diplomat and propogandist for the Polish government in exile.

After the war, Giedroyć moved to Rome and founded the first in a series of emigre Polish cultural institutions, a publishing house. He soon moved on to Paris, where he co-founded a journal called Kultura that became hugely influential among Poles both within and outside Poland.

In Kultura Giedroyć laid the foundations for a post-communist Polish foreign policy. Giedroyć asserted, first, that Soviet communism would collapse within his lifetime, and second, that Russia would remain a militaristic, expansionist state. Poles, he wrote, must prepare for a post-Soviet world in which their main foreign policy challenge would be asserting their independence in the face of Russian imperialism.

Giedroyć posited two pillars for such a policy. First, Poland must have good relations with all of its neighbors. It must, therefore, recognize its post-1939 borders and accept the loss of huge territories to Ukraine, Belarus, and Lithuania. In the 1950s this was heresy among Polish exiles, for whom restoration of Poland as it existed in the 1930s was a key goal. Giedroyć argued that this was nationalist, myth-besotted folly. Poland needed friends more than it needed territories now occupied by non-Poles. But Giedroyć did not just advocate for friendship with Poland's neighbors. He wrote that Poland must become a friend and advocate for all nations resisting Soviet or Russian imperialism.

The second pillar must be friendship with America. European allies were great and Poland must seek them, but WW II had convinced Giedroyć that France, Germany and Britain were not reliable defense partners. Only US friendship could secure Poland's independence. Poland must, therefore, seek membership in NATO.

All these things that Giedroyć wrote of in the 1950s to 1970s have come to pass. Soviet communism collapsed, but Russia remained the greatest threat to Poland. The post-communist Polish government adopted Giedroyć's policy of accepting its borders and pursuing friendship with its neighbors. They very much pursued friendship with the US, for example supporting our dubious invasion of Iraq. They are members of NATO. And the have consistently spoken up for all nations under attack by Russia, most prominently Ukraine.

And to think that I never heard of Giedroyć until yesterday.

wikipedia, longer article at culture.pl, 13-minute video from Kraut.

The Department of Homeland Security Wants to Depopulate America

The US contains roughly 11 to 14 million undocumented immigrants and 38 million legal immigrants, so to get to 100 million we would have to deport 50 million native born citizens. This account is a disgrace.

Noah Smith on the Future of Liberalism in a post-Woke, post-Trump World

Excellent essay from Noah Smith, Where Does a  Liberal Go from Here? The subtitle is, "Our movement overreached and crashed. But the fundamental ideals are still just as powerful."

Imagine being a French liberal in the year 1815. You spent your youth dreaming of an end to tyranny and the stultification of the estate society, reading the works of Voltaire and Rousseau and Montesquieu and Diderot, talking of liberty with your friends in cafes. Yours was not among the names that history would remember from that era, but you once attended a salon in a rich woman’s house in Paris. You were not part of the mob that stormed the Bastille in 1789, but you felt your heart leap when you heard the news, because you knew that now everything would change. When you read the terms of the Constitution of 1791, you saw the fulfillment of your youthful daydreams become the solid fabric of a new reality.

Imagine, then, standing in 1815, a quarter century after the Revolution, looking back at what it had all become. That first bright rush of freedom had given way, first to the murderous insanity of the Terror and the Committee for Public Safety, then to the thuggish new imperialism and endless bloody wars of Napoleon, and finally to the fall of all Europe to conservative reaction under the Congress of Vienna. Imagine looking back on the arc of your beliefs, your movement, and your life, now as an old man, with no prospects for another, better Revolution ahead of you.

Would you think your dreams had failed? Would you decide that everything you had believed had been an illusion, and that freedom, democracy, and the Rights of Man were false idols that led only to chaos and bloodshed?

If so, you would be utterly wrong. 

After a long tour of liberal/progressive follies, which have led a year when, despite Trump, 64% of Americans dislike the Democratic Party, Smith writes:

I’ve spent much of the year since Trump’s election constructing the litany of progressivism’s sins and overreaches. That job is now complete, but the question is: Where does a liberal go from here? Those of us who grew up in the late 20th century liberal dream are now standing on the beach by the hulk of our wrecked ship, staring out to sea and contemplating our next move.

America is now unquestionably in a more conservative era. People crave law and order in their cities. They have soured on woke culture and progressive spending programs. They are groping around for reasons to re-embrace traditional values. This really is Europe after the Congress of Vienna — perhaps not just in the United States, but across much of the world.

I agree with this completely. Americans may turn against Trump, but not toward Progressivism. In this conservative, nervous era, the path forward for liberalism is away from new ideas and back to the tried and true: good government, anti-corruption, excellence in schools, better health care, equal rights rather than "equity." Smith concludes like this:

So that’s what you do if you’re a French liberal in 1815. You try again. Looking back at history, we see that the project of human freedom and dignity has had plenty of low points, but that so far it has always recovered. Even if you’re old, you pick yourself up and move onward. Even if you’ve made mistakes and supported one or two bad ideas for a while, you get back on track and learn from your errors. Even if you don’t know exactly where liberalism goes from here, you sit down and you think and you read and you talk to smart people until you figure out a new direction. You try again.

Let's.

Sherds

If you go to the web site of the Getty Museum and search their collection for ceramic objects made between 600 and 300 BC, with images, you get 4,750 hits. Most of which are sherds like these. Sometimes I find these little glimpses more evocative than complete scenes.

The Getty glosses this as a male figure costumed as a satyr and armed as a peltast (light, missile-throwing infantry). What story would that be part of?

A Muse.

Oh, these little wonders.

Is Punk Leftist? What Would that Even Mean?

Via Matt Yglesias, I discovered that the DC Public Library sold these t-shirts as a fund raiser for their Punk Archive, which stores lots of ephemera from the local music scene in the 1970s to 1990s.

Like Yglesias, I think this is stupid; there is nothing less punk than a public library. 

A public library is a place where everyone has to walk slowly and speak quietly, where everything depends on stuff being filed in exactly the right place. Does that sound punk?

I suppose the people selling these shirts imagine that public libraries are punk in that they are anti-capitalist (because they are publicly owned, and allow people to read books while contributing only minimally to the wealth of publishers) and enable people to do research outside the bounds of what is taught in school or sold at your local mainstream bookstore.

But that's silly. The world is not simply divided into socialist vs. capitalist. It is also divided in a bunch of other ways, including order vs. disorder. And on that axis, the public library is at the farthest extreme of order, while punk stands for raucous disorder.

I have an acquaintance who was into the DC punk scene in the 1990s, and she is now an anti-vax Trump supporter.

My wife and I vote pretty much exclusively Democrat. We believe in gay rights, redistributive taxation, national health insurance, and building up the public sector. We are suspicious of foreign wars and support medical aid to Africa. We suspect the police could do their jobs with a lot less violence. 

But in many ways we are very conservative. We live a highly-ordered, family-focused suburban existence, with a mowed lawn, a flower garden, and a white picket fence (really). We have a cat and a Labrador retriever. We work professional jobs for big bureaucratic corporations and have done well in that life because we are both very reliable. We do not yell, scream, throw things, damage property, drive recklessly, wear outlandish clothes, or otherwise draw attention to ourselves.

We are the epitome of anti-punk.

To the extent that punk has any real political content, that would be anarchism. As my readers know, I read a fair amount about anarchism and am well aware of the price we pay in freedom for our wealthy, well-ordered existence. But anarchism has nothing to do with the kind of American left that supports public libraries.

As Yglesias notes, in the early 1900s the US had significant movements of both anarchists and socialists. But while the anarchists were trying to assassinate presidents, the socialists focused on stuff like creating publicly owned water systems, and agitating for the 40-hour work week. Not very punk.

Public libraries come from the "build public water systems" side of the left, not the do drugs, dance all night, and fight the man side.

Some Old Posts that Got an Unusual Number of Page Views in 2025

Roberto Calasso, "The Ruin of Kasch," 2023, 790 views in 2025. This post has gotten more than 2,000 views in all, which I supposed makes me one of the chief expositors of this difficult book; I mean, how many people can have searched for reviews of this book? I can't imagine it gets assigned in many classes.

Sickles, Scythes, and the Conundrum of Slow Technological Change, 293 views in 2025. Happy to see that this 2021 post on a historical qundary has gotten some traction.

Why Masturbation is Worse than Rape, 2016, 323 page views in 2025. Interesting that this post explaining the medieval Catholic church's teaching on sexuality has been popular for three years now, after sinking like a stone when I posted it. I am pleased because I found some folks online misunderstanding what Aquinas wrote about this, because they did not understand the way he structured his arguments. E.g., they did not get that the "objections" are things he disagrees with, so they were puzzling over why he seemed to contradict himself. Happy to set them straight.

Railway Spine and the Originis of PTSD, 2021, 355 page views in 2025. Just a short post wondering what it is about modern life that seems to give us so much "trauma;" no idea why anyone would read it.

Gay Renaissance Artists, Worldly Churchmen, Corruption, Tolerance, Aristocracy, Populism, Art, and Life, 2019, 410 page views in 2025. A post I like, written after I read a biography of Leonardo da Vinci.

Nicolas Berdyaev's Amazing Footnote, 2017, 528 views in 2025. I suppose my post on this famous footnote gets views because I actually opened the book and captured an image of the page, so you can see this wonder in its original setting.

Franz von Stuck, or, What Did the Symbolists Mean? 2014, 377 page views in 2025. By far my most popular post on an invidual painter three years in a row. No idea why.

But the real mystery of this year is my sudden fame over the summer, followed by an equally sudden slide into obscurity.

Now What?

Ok, I have no love for Nicolás Maduro, and he definitely rigged the election that put him in power.

But so far as I can see the only real power center left in Venezuela is the army, and to date they have remained loyal to the Bolivarian regime. Who is going to overthrow them? Most of the opposition is in exile. If power just passes to the Vice President or the Defense Minister, what difference will that make?

I few years ago the US war-gamed a scenario of trying to overthrow Maduro and the end result was the whole country descending into anarchy. So I don't think our fighting the Venezuelan army is a great idea.

I guess we'll see, but so far this looks to me like our strike on Iran: big booms, little long-term impact.

Update: Russian foreign ministry denounces this "armed aggression."

Update: confirmed that the Vice President, Defense Minister, and Interior Minister (the regime's top enforcer) are all still at large.

Update: the one group of people who really seem to love this are Ukrainians. My Ukraine war feed is full of posts featuring Maduro and Putin talking about their great friendship.

Update: Oz Katerji sees lots of equivalences: "All the Realists must now immediately demand the surrender of Venezuela to the large nuclear power, and don’t blame me about it, I didn’t make the rules."

Update, from Big Content Guy: "big day for guys who like to monitor situations."

Anarcho-Primitivism and the Civilized Condition

I just listened to an interesting lecture on Anarcho-Primitivism from a YouTuber who calls himself B Kane. Fascinating to learn about a discourse within which Ted Kaczynski is a comparatively sane and reasonable voice.

The basic argument of the anarcho-primitivists is that because civilization imposes myriad restrictions upon us, we should give it up and go back to being hunter gatherers. Other anarchists, they think, are foolish in thinking that modern technology is compatible with real freedom. I agree with this; I think that to imagine building airplanes or a health care system without rules and hierarchies is just nuts. Our way of life, especially the disciplined middle-class existence that is at the center of our world, absolutely depends on following millions of rules, many of them laid down by credentialed experts. I agree that in some ways our lives are less free and less under our control than those of many hunter gatherers.

But.

I have many, many freedoms that hunter-gatherers never had. Including the freedom to explore weird philosophical ideas that nobody I know personally understands. I cannot see how freedom at this basic level exists on a sort of sliding scale; on the contrary, proclaiming one kind of freedom necessarily implies giving up some other freedom.

I often question techno-anarchists along the same lines: your world of voluntary cooperatives takes away my freedom to live in a capitalist world governed by cash transactions. I would really rather not have personal relationships with the people who supply my lettuce and my electrical power. So far as I can see, exchanging the power of capitalist relations for the power of face-to-face communes gives no advantage to me. 

Seeking maximum freedom is self-contradictory. Balance is the best we can do.

Besides, I think that reason and imagination are lousy ways to design a good place to live. The only way I think has any validity is empiricism: look around the world at the places people want to live and see what they have in common. And that is: representative democracy; large, powerful states; and mixed economies. You may find one or all of those systems stupid or immoral, but the fact is that the countries fighting to keep people out all have them.

But.

I do wonder sometimes if the bizarre dissatisfaction of so many contemporary people with our wealthy societies comes from the anarcho-primitivist parts of our brains. We evolved to live in band-level societies with very narrow cultures and simple technologies, and maybe our huge, diverse nations full of mysterious machines just mess with our brains.

The American Book Business in 2025

On the whole, the US book business is healthy: 707 million books sold in the year, including 184 million adult novels. It may be true that the average American reads fewer novels these days, or perhaps that the averaged college-educated American reads fewer novels. But in a country this big 10 percent of the people can drive an enormous industry.

Of course, most of that 184 million is genre fiction, especially thrillers, fantasy and romantasy. This New York Times piece mentions three fiction writers: thriller writer Freida McFadden (5.5 million books sold), young adult writer Suzanne Collins, whose Hunger Games prequel sold 2 million copies, and Rebecca Yarro, whose dragonrider Romantasy books sold more than a million copies.

Let me just insert a personal note here and say that I have hated everything I have ever read about people riding dragons. It's always utterly unmythical and unmagical, just, like, wouldn't it be cool to ride a big flying monster? Dragons should be more than that.

Physical bookstores are also doing ok, with sales holding steady.

Incidentally my own books accounted for 8 of those 184 million novels, so 0.0000000043% of the total vs. Freida McFadden's 3.0%.

Doubt

Great doubt, great awakening. Little doubt, little awakening. No doubt, no awakening. 

–Zen saying

Links 2 January 2026

Lahore

Still uploading chapters of The Voice from the Darkness at Royal Road.

Ben Pentreath, solstice in Tuscany, wonderful photographs, plus more from the Orkneys.

The top post of the year at Marginal Revolution was "Trumpian Policy as Cultural Policy," in which Tyler Cowen argued that everything Trump does should be considered first as a move in the culture wars. The rest of the top ten are here, much interesting stuff.

Pew finds that there is no mass conversion of young Americans to Catholicism or Orthodoxy; some are joining but an equal number are leaving. The headline of their article is, "Religion Holds Steady in America."

Ethan Mollick asks Claude to generate a fake witty Churchill quote. (Twitter/X)

Outstanding three part series on Turkish history from Austrian YouTuber Kraut: Hittites to Atatürk (1 hour 45 minutes), Atatürk to Abdullah Gül (1 hour 30 minutes), Erdogan and the Future (1 hour). One of the best works of history I have consumed this year.

CDC allows researchers to release data which includes both the number of Americans diagnosed with autism and the severity of their symptoms, and it shows that all the increase is in the sufferers with mild impairment, or no impairment at all. (Twitter/X, paper) Very strong evidence that the "rise" in autism is all about expanding the definition.

Photographer Rolfe Horn, featured here back in 2009, now has a web site with lots of images. Now he seems to work in color, but I still like his older, black and white stuff better, so that's what I linked to.

Manhattan's steam tunnels, which still heat a majority of the island's buildings, article that won one of David Brooks' Sidney Awards.

Large-scale study of isotopic ratios in bones from English skeletons finds, not separate Anglo-Saxon and Danish invasions, but a continuous influx of foreigners throughout the early Middle Ages, with roughly 40% of burials in eastern England showing evidence of foreign birth from 400 to 1200 AD. This is a very weird finding and I am not sure what to make of it.

And another from Brooks, Adam Mastroianni on "Why Aren't Smart People Happier?"

Amazing blog post on the Roman mosaics of southern Spain.

Interesting essay on movies, monster-fucking, contemporary gender differenes, and the general messed-upedness of human sexuality.

One eight-year-old made the perfect Christmas gift for his economist father. (Twitter/X)

Wes Cecil on Daoism for the stressful modern world., 45-minute video.

The challenges of coding in the AI world (Twitter/X).

Another fabulous gift from Big Pharma: Trikafta, a drug mixture that promises many cystic fibrosis sufferers a normal lifespan. (Twitter/X, wikipedia, Pharmacy Times)

Annual letter from Dan Wang, whose two obsessions are computer tech and China. Very interesting on what the SF tech world is like and why he prefers finance guys to tech bros.

Annual NY Times piece on the year's best sentences, most of which are actually short paragraphs. Two examples. A.O. Scott: "Occam’s razor, the venerable philosophical principle that the truest explanation is likely to be the simplest, has been thrown away. We’re living in the age of Occam’s chain saw, when the preferred answer is the one that makes the loudest noise and generates the most debris." David Brooks: "One of the reasons MAGA conservatives admire Putin is that they see him as an ally against their ultimate enemy — the ethnic studies program at Columbia."

This paper calculates large gains for students admitted to Texas universities at the bottom of their class, compared to similar students who were not admitted.

2025 LLM Year in Review (Twitter/X)

To get reliable electricity, Africans are turning more and more to Chinese solar panels. (NY Times) Cheap solar power will likely end up having a huge impact on the whole continent.

Austrian YouTuber Kraut, "Why Noam Chomsky is Garbage," focusing on Chomsky's denial of the Bosnian genocide, 40-minute video. I agree that when the US does something good, Chomsky's brain glitches and he begins to sputter with ever more disturbing lies. What a weird man.

For my usual ideosynchratic reasons I checked the wikipedia article on the Battle of the Tollense Valley, c. 1250 BC, a truly remarkable Bronze Age site in northern Germany near the Baltic Sea. But the article hasn't been updated since 2017, and I had thought excavations were still ongoing. So I looked a little further and found this recent publication, which says that some of the Bronze arrowheads likely came from Bohemia, so this was some kind of inter-regional conflict. This article also has a good map showing how the finds are distributed along the river.

Brief year-in-review article about the space industry. Hundreds of companies compete in the launch and satellite business and new ones are founded every week.

To get people to adopt the pit bull mixes they have so many of, some shelters are branding them "Labrador Retrivers" or other innocuous breeds. (Twitter/X; some academic backup) And here on pit bull owners who promote intentional inbreeding. The author, a stats guy, started a monstrous thread about all of this when he was mauled by a pit bull that "just snapped" after never attacking anyone before. Happens every day in America. I get why gangsters like pit bulls, but the affection of what appear to be normal, middle-class women for the dogs they call "house hippos" mystifies me. Dog breeding matters: retrievers retrieve without being taught, pointers point without being taught, and fighting dogs fight whether you teach them to or not.

Russian horse cavalry vs. Ukrainian drones. (Twitter/X)

A Russian infantryman throws snowballs at a drone. (Twitter/X)

Alderney Roman Fort

Alderney is one of the Channel Islands, little bits of British territory off the French coast. Alderney boasts one town and a bunch of old fortifications. These include an Elizabethan fort (above),

a substantial set of forts and batteries built in the 1800s, 

and several concrete blockhouses built by the Nazis. 

All of which was probably a waste of time, because most experts who have looked at the place have deemed it fundamentally indefesible:

The island was never able to effectively defend itself and survived attack mainly from being too poor and insignificant to be worth the expense of raiding. 

Gladstone dismissed the 19th-century plan of fortification as

a monument of human folly, useless to us...but perhaps not absolutely useless to a possible enemy, with whom we may at some period have to deal and who may possibly be able to extract some profit in the way of shelter and accommodation from the ruins

The WW II Allies simply ignored the place, leaving its very hungry defenders to surrender at the end of the war.

But besides all those well documented forts, there is this thing, known as The Nunnery. What is it?

Well, it looks like a Roman fort, albeit with a few later additions. The stonework seems Roman, and the shape closely resembled the four Roman "signal stations" along the east coast of Yorkshire. But the walls of those signal stations survive to about knee height. Who ever heard of a Roman fort with standing walls 18 feet high?

Debate about the site therefore raged for more than 150 years.

Excavations carried out in 2008 to 2011 finally nailed the site's origin: Roman artifacts found around the foundation confirm that it is indeed a Roman fort. It now bills itself the best preserved Roman fort in Britain.

Elizabethan records describe a tall tower standing in the center of the fort, but that disappeared before any archaeologist got a good look at it. But they did find the foundations, which showed that this tower was pretty big, leading them to reconstruct it like this. I don't know how could you tell from the foundations that the walls went straight up, rather than some sort of pyramid? But anyway this is the official interpetation.

I learned about this from a sort of New Year's best wishes email I received from a regular reader of this blog who lives in Alderney. I loved learning about Alderney, and I love knowing that I have readers around the world.